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Monday, December 17, 2007

Teebore's Five Favorite Non-traditional Christmas Songs

5. Christmas Time is Here (Charlie Brown Christmas): This jazzy tune by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, for me, captures an often overlooked bittersweet, wistful feeling associated with the holidays. After all, once you grow up Christmas never seems as magical as it did when you were a kid. Every time I hear this song, I think of that. It sounds depressing, but it’s really not. It just helps remind me of how great Christmas was when I was a kid, and how it’s not quite the same nowadays.

4. Christmas Eve/ Sarajevo (Trans-Siberian Orchestra): I love this song enough to have specifically bought the CD it was on, thinking I was bound to enjoy at least several of the other songs on it. Turns out, not so much. With the exception of this song, everything else on the CD was such crap that I barely remember it, and quickly got rid of the CD itself. This one song, though, man, I love it. It’s the only Christmas song I’ll listen to year round.

3. Swiss Colony Beef Log (Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics): Cartman’s love song to the Hillshire Farms-esque Swiss Colony beef log sounds like a power ballad straight out of the eighties and is easily the best song on the enjoyable South Park Christmas album. It’s also hilarious, and approximately sixteen different kinds of awesome.

2. Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Band-Aid): Whereas this song actually is straight out of the 80s. A Who’s Who of 80s pop stars (Sting and the Police, U2 and Bono, Boy George, George Michael, Phil Collins rocking it out on the drums) gathered together to record a song for famine relief in Africa, with lyrics written to point out to 80s yuppies how much better they have it come Christmas than the starving people in Africa, who too busy being hungry (and perhaps, not even Christian, but that’s another song) to realize its Christmas at all. It’s filled with wonderfully melodramatic over-the-top lyrics:

And it's a world of dread and fearWhere the only water flowing isThe bitter sting of tearsAnd the Christmas bells that are ringingAre clanging chimes of doom

Any song that has Bono singing the line “well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you”, gets an A in my book.

1. Dominic the Donkey (The Italian Christmas Donkey) (Lou Monte): Yeah, you've probably never heard it. They don't play it on the radio all that much. Go here and check out the awesome. Yeah, that's right, your mind just got blown, didn't it?

1 comment:

Listen, everyone knows that the greatest Christmas Song ever conceived of and recorded is Snoopy vs. The Red Baron. (The greatest Christmas song ever conceived of but not recorded is "Santa's Got a Rocket Launcher.") Anyway, not only is Snoopy vs. The Red Baron just plain awesome, but it has a nice message too.

"Even when locked in a death match with your mortal enemy, Christmas is a time to come together and celebrate."

As far as "Do They Know It's Christmas Time At All?" is concerned, my question is, do they care? They're probably not even Christian. The starving children of Africa are probably more concerned about where their next meal is coming and less concerned with the birthday of the son of a God who abandoned then. But I digress.

All Dominic is is a poor-man's Rudolph. I mean, Santa's Reindeer can FLY, the don't NEED to climb the Italian mountains. That makes Dominic more useless than Mrs. Claus. (We all know Santa gets all the action he needs for the year on Christmas from all those lonely housewives. Cookies, milk, and sex...ahhh yeah!)

However, as a Christmas present from me to you, I've put Dominic the Donkey in lights on the You Tube clip to the right. Enjoy!